DHO Notes for an Address

Notes for an Address By Honorable Donald H. Oliver, Q.C. At the 80th Anniversary Dinner Rotary Club of Amherst Saturday, February 28, 2015 Wandlyn Inn Amherst, Nova Scotia Good evening ... I'm honoured and delighted to join you tonight to help celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the Rotary Club of Amherst. And I want to thank Morris Haugg for extending this kind invitation to me and for making all the arrangements. I am doubly honoured to be here tonight it being Saturday the 28th of February, the last day of black history month in 2015. It’s a special day that provides me an opportunity to pay tribute to Theresa Halfkenny, this years recipient of the community Paul Harris fellowship. There could be no more fitting tribute for this significant day in the lives of African-Canadians. Theresa is truly someone who has , for a number of years, provided service and leadership to the community. Tonight , in celebration of her great honor, I wish to take you back in History and remind you of the struggles, the contributions and the background of, as we have been variously called, African Nova Scotians, Visible Minorities , Blacks, Negroes, Coloreds, former slaves, etc. To begin, let me ask you a question. How many of you had an opportunity to view the Book of Negroes six-part mini-series on the CBC recently? (Show of hands). For those of you who haven't yet 1 experienced this remarkable series, let me give you a thumbnail sketch of what it's about. It opens with Aminata Diallo, an elderly black woman, as she begins to share her "slave narrative" with a group of white men. She describes her life as an 11-year-old child in West Africa. Then we witness the murders of her parents and her crossing in a ship over what she calls the "great river". In Charlestown, South Carolina, she is sold into slavery to a plantation owner, who brutally tries to break her spirit. He fails and Aminata is sold to a second owner, but she escapes from him while on a trip to New York. She then helps the British during the America Revolutionary War. In return for her loyalty to the British Crown, she is given her freedom and travels to Nova Scotia, where she helps to settle the Black community of Birchtown. While free, however, she and other Blacks continue to face sickening discrimination and hardship. So when settlement in Sierra Leone is offered to "free Blacks", she fulfills her dream of returning home along with 1200 other former slaves. Despite that, however, she's remains driven to help free her fellow Africans and travels to England. There, her "slave narrative" serves to 2 galvanize the white-led Abolitionist movement. Like Rotarians, Aminata's motto is clearly "service above self." I am a decedent of those 3,000 slaves who like Aminata, came to Nova Scotia as United Empire Loyalists. But while Aminata's narrative is fiction, it's rooted in fact. Since February is Black History Month here in Canada, I'd like to share with you some of the stories about Blacks in Nova Scotia. I'll tell you about the struggles they overcame, the impact they made on our history, and the proud legacy they left us that still lingers today. Let me begin with more about the Black United Empire Loyalists, who came to Atlantic Canada after the War of American Independence. They were enticed to come north with the promise of owning land, a chance to build their own fortunes, and lives as free people. However, history tells us that most of them never received the land and provisions promised to them. They were cheated, left to fend for themselves or forced to work on public projects such as road building. Others were taken from the rebels as spoils of war and were not freed like the Black Loyalists who fought on the side of the British. They simply changed owners. 3 The tragic story of Mary Postell was typical of the many Blacks who sided with the British at the time. Mary Postell was the slave of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner when the War of Independence began. But she managed to escape with her children to claim freedom behind British lines. Then under the pretense of verifying her papers, a white man confiscated her certificate of freedom. So she went to St. Augustine in Florida with her husband and children to work as servants to Jesse Gray. Gray claimed that legally Mary was his slave. And when he immigrated to Nova Scotia, he took Mary and her daughters along. Afraid that Jesse Gray would sell her away from her children, Mary fled with her children. Gray went to court to prove he owned her and apparently he won his case. To punish Mary, he took her down the coast to Argyle, where he sold her for one hundred bushels of potatoes. Ignoring her heartbreak, he also sold her daughter Flora to another man. And Gray kept Mary's daughter Nell as his own property. In 1793, the Abolition Act was passed in Upper Canada. This law freed slaves aged 25 and over and made it illegal to bring slaves 4 into Upper Canada. Consequently, Upper Canada became a safe haven for runaway slaves. The Abolition Act also made Canada the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to move toward the abolition of slavery. Forty years later, in 1833, the British Imperial Act abolished slavery throughout the Empire, including Canada. By the 1860s, there were 40,000 Blacks in Canada — the descendants of Black slaves in New France, Black Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, Black refugees from the War of 1812, and the Black fugitives who came to Upper Canada to escape slavery. Many white Canadians had opposed slavery and helped Black refugees, but many others “feared the influx of Black settlers, seeing them as backward, ignorant, immoral, criminal and an economic threat.” Blacks faced widespread discrimination in housing, immigration and access to public services well into the 20th century. What is more, there were segregation laws enacted in Canada more than 50 years before the first Jim Crow laws came into effect in the American South (1890). From 1833 in Nova Scotia, and from 1850 in Upper Canada, it was law to have separate schools 5 for "Blacks or People of Colour". By 1960, there would still be seven formal Black school districts and three exclusively Black schools in Nova Scotia. The Ontario and Nova Scotia laws governing black separate schools were not repealed until the mid-1960s. Segregation was common practice in other areas too. Blacks were not allowed to eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as whites. And during the First World War, black men were denied the opportunity of serving their country in the regular army. They were instead relegated to the No. 2 Construction Battalion. This Battalion was comprised of 600 black soldiers, but all of the unit's 19 officers were white, with one exception — Captain William A. White, the unit's Chaplain, my grandfather and the first Black officer to serve in the British military. The Battalion's role was to support the front lines — building roads and bridges, stringing barb wire, defusing land mines so advancing troops could move forward, and bringing out the wounded. Conditions were dangerous and horrible. They were last on the supply line and often went weeks without changes in socks or underwear. 6 Even though they managed to break a number of production records, they were seen as lazy and not fit enough to fight. In those days, Black women were also not allowed to train as nurses alongside white women. The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People — or the NSAACP founded by my brother, the Reverend Dr. William P. Oliver and his wife Pearleen Oliver — together with the Toronto Negro Veterans Association put pressure on nursing schools. And in the late 1940s, they won the battle for the acceptance of Black nursing students. Back then, Blacks could not even sit on the main floor of a movie theatre. If they did, however innocently, they were summarily punished as Canada’s own Rosa Parks quickly learned in 1946. Her name was Viola Desmond, a successful Halifax beautician and businesswoman. She was arrested for choosing to sit downstairs in the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, instead of upstairs in the balcony or "nigger’s heaven". She was thrown in jail for 12 hours and then finally charged with "attempting to defraud the Federal Government." The charge was based on her refusal to pay the one-cent 7 amusement tax difference between the three cents charged to those sitting in the balcony and the two cents charged to those sitting downstairs. Viola would not agree to pay more than the white customers for the same show. After a short trial she was sentenced to a fine of $20 and 30 days in jail. Again, the NSAACP took up the fight and helped raise the money to pay the fine. Together with Carrie Best, publisher of The Clarion, the first Black newspaper in Nova Scotia, they also generated considerable publicity about the "Jim Crow" laws that fostered racism and bigotry. The NSAACP kept the coals of controversy on the segregation issue burning bright for eight years, when finally their efforts led to the repeal of segregation policies in Nova Scotia in 1954. This is more than a year before Rosa Parks’ action in Montgomery, Alabama, helped bring the civil rights movement in the U.S.

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